You can no longer bet on Ukrainian ping pong in New Jersey

One of the weirder sports developments of the pandemic was the rise of “sports” that people typically didn’t care about like darts or table tennis, with people actually wagering on their outcomes, proving that people will bet on just about anything. Now, New Jersey has put the brakes on betting on all table tennis competitions in Ukraine, as well as on matches involving six individual players.

The reason, according to ESPN.com, is potential match fixing. Yes, cheating in ping pong! The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement notified all the sports books in the state that were accepting bets on table tennis to suspend taking wagers on the Ukraine matches or the ones involving the suspicious players. ESPN.com quotes the notice as saying “While there is not yet any evidence that any match fixing occurred in New Jersey, due the nature of the alert, the Division is suspending approval for wagering on all table tennis events in the Ukraine, including but not limited to the Setka Cup, WIN Cup, and TT Cup.”

I’m going to go ahead and give you the names of the questionable players you can’t bet on just in case you were thinking about it: Liliia Zaitseva, Ivan Gaysin, Karen Dzhanibekyan, Eduard Panichev, Anastasia Efimova and Gleb Zotov; not exactly household names in the US, but I guess they’re big in the competitive table tennis game.

Hopefully, with MLB, NBA, and NHL games being available soon, people in New Jersey can go back to losing their money betting on more familiar sports.

The post above reflects the thoughts and observations of New Jersey 101.5 talk show host Bill Doyle. Any opinions expressed are Bill Doyle's own.